Inspired partially by that lovely Buzzfeed article and my own personal frustrations. This is… a hot mess of a story. What If is still alive. I just like to write my way out of things.
The Procedural
Chapter One:
"Don't even think about it," Clara said as a student picked up handful of chips.
"But he called me mum a fat cow," he said.
"I'll be having words with Trevor," she said. "Now go back to eating."
He just nodded and picked up a single chip to eat.
Clara was about to interrupt a card game when she saw the Doctor enter. She approached him.
"I'm on monitor duty," she said.
"And you can be back on monitor duty in two minutes," he said. "First we need to investigate a mysterious black mass in the universe."
"What's so special about it?" she asked.
"Several spacecraft that have encountered it have recorded feelings of intense sadness afterwards. Now come on."
Clara could have argued that her school duties were more important but she knew that would not work on him. She could have taken a stand and refused, but the truth was life was boring without the doctor trying put her life in peril in the middle of duties such as this. She followed him to her classroom where he kept the TARDIS.
She entered after him and he spun a few nobs and pulled a lever. It shifted slightly indicating they were traveling.
"So, what do you think it is?" she asked.
"It has to be powerful," the Doctor said looking at a screen. "Twenty ships have encountered it and have felt sadness, fear, and frustration."
Clara looked at the screen. It resembled a small throbbing smudge on the screen in a sea of stars.
"Shall we try to land on it?" the Doctor asked.
Her initial response might have been no, but after facing down legions of deadly aliens and monsters, she merely asked:
"Do you think the TARDIS will let us?"
"We can try," he said and pressed a few buttons and pulled a lever.
"This is interesting," he said. "It has layers of atmosphere made up of light and sensory quantum variations."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning were going through a reality shift before we land on the surface. Hold on."
She did as instructed and suddenly she wasn't in the TARDIS anymore.
…
A man was being beaten in what looked like a jail cell. His mouth was covered so he couldn't scream. But Clara could.
"Stop it!" she screamed. "You're hurting him!"
They paid no attention to her.
She rushed towards the man doing the hitting. "Stop it!"
Clara merely passed through them like a ghost. The energy shifted and she was in a new place.
The same man was lying on the ground with a neck injury. "FBI" was printed across his vest.
A woman applying pressure to the wound.
"Ethan just open your eyes," she pleaded.
"How can I help?" Clara asked.
The woman just cried.
Clara suddenly felt her self being pulled down through the ground. She remained calm.
A woman was holding a gun to her head with a woman nestled right beside her. The same man, "Ethan" was holding an injury to his arm as tears streamed down his face.
"You don't have to do this," he said.
The woman pulled the trigger and both fell to the ground as blood spilled from their bodies.
Ethan began to sob. Clara tried to hug him but instead walked through him.
She ended up in an ambulance where he was in a gown, looking horribly pale and coughing up blood into a bag.
Clara couldn't take it anymore. Too much sadness. Too many horrors. No man could survive all this. What in space was this?
"DOCTOR!" she screamed. "DOCTOR!"